Wrong. It was irritating, in a way that’s quintessentially Booker. Twitter ruined the shining Cory Booker image for me some time ago, the same way his Bain remarks seem to have ruined it for others. It has nothing to do with his policy and everything to do with his self-presentation. Things I admire about a politician in the abstract (dogged, micro-level commitment to his constituents, say) are incredibly annoying when I and the more than a million other people who follow Booker are looped in on all of those interactions — mostly, I can’t help but suspect, so we could all know they were happening. A mayor showing up with a snow shovel in response to an @reply might make a great story, but is responding to individual complaints about garbage pickup and electricity outages really the best use of his time — or the most efficient way to tackle the problem? And it’s but one step from there to: Should he really be spending this much time on Twitter,anyway?

Booker seems to genuinely enjoy it, but there’s surely a heavy dose of brand-management behind the decision to tweet (as there is for any politician, naturally). His feed reveals Booker to be relentlessly self-promotional and narcissistic; these are qualities inherent to most politicians and acquired by the rest in order to win campaigns, but there’s something particularly unnerving about having them so fully on display. Twitter is a place where bragging, humble or otherwise, is mocked. That Booker is doing the bragging himself, rather than letting a staffer sing his praises, makes it worse. The man rescued people from a burning building not so long ago, and yet by that point I’d become so closely attuned to his self-promotion that I found myself getting irritated with him for basking in the moment. He’d risked his life, admirable any way you slice it, and I still couldn’t help wondering if the PR possibilities had been a factor in hisdecision.

Yet the bar is so low for politicians’ Twitter feeds that Booker still gets praised as the form’s highest practitioner. Mostly, their feeds err on the side of the extremely anodyne: Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Michelle Obama, and even Mr. Gaffe-tastic himself, Joe Biden, keep their feeds strictly to preapproved, vetted talking points and announcements of appearances, manned by faceless low-level communications staffers. A few politicians offer a more unmediated look at their inner lives, and are celebrated for it — Claire McCaskill’s football fandom, we now know, is not just for show, nor is Chuck Grassley’s hatred of the so-called History Channel. Politicians! They’re Just Like Us! (Except with less aptitude for smartphonekeyboards.)